


all my fucking feelings

by dawittiest



Category: Daredevil (TV), Punisher (TV)
Genre: Americana, Bittersweet, F/M, Road Trips, Starting Over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-05-31 16:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15123359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: They drive until they can’t anymore.





	all my fucking feelings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klutzy_girl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klutzy_girl/gifts).



> You said Kastle and roadtrips and I immediately knew what to write. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did writing this.
> 
> (I changed the rating to T but be advised that there’s a lot of swearing, mostly from Karen, and a non-graphic sex scene.)
> 
> The title’s from Lana Del Rey’s _In My Feelings._
> 
> Thanks to sleepyMoritz and DancingPlague for looking it over!

They stop for gas somewhere past Delaware. Before that it’s been interstate, toll gate, built-in jingle playing out a cheery radar warning, toll gate. Karen stretches her legs when Frank goes to buy them some fuel, kicks mindlessly at a pitiful strip of yellowed grass next to a pump. She watches through half-lidded eyes as ash falls from her fingertips and is swept away with an autumn gust of wind on otherwise warm September day. It’s dusking.

“You smoke?” She turns around. Frank is carrying a plastic bag filled with junk and those cheap-ass coffee sludge things that come ready in cans, one in each fist. He hands one to her.

Karen shrugs. “Bad habits die hard,” she murmurs. Frank grunts.

Back to the car. It’s a 2006 Volvo, the upholstery smelling like dead flies and dusty plastic; there’s some leg space but just enough. Karen kicks off the pumps and stretches her long calves on the dashboard, but she can’t find herself a comfortable position for the ride.

“Feet off the dash,” Frank mutters.

Karen straightens up and does not take the feet off the dash.

“Are you kidding me?” she asks. “The car’s stolen.”

Frank grumbles noncommittally.

“You don’t put feet on the dash.” Karen snorts. She stretches her toes so the big one leaves a print on the front window; Frank flicks her on the knee and Karen snorts again. Frank almost smiles.

She rummages through the loot from the gas station. Salty stix – God, that takes her back, day-trips to Albany, a line of kids penguin-hobbling to the bus, their backpacks stuffed with snacks and berry Bonine and everything else a kid doesn’t need for a 10-hours sightseeing trip out of state – another two cans of the coffee-drink, a neck pillow. That throws her. It’s inflatable, with a mildly nauseating flower print. Clearly it’s meant for her. Karen touches the faux-suede fabric with a tip of her finger and something tightens in her chest. The bottom of the plastic bag crinkles. She fishes out a bag of mixed nuts.

“Seriously?” She holds up the bag. “No one likes nut mixes.”

“It’s nutritious and shit,” Frank explains. “It’s good for you.”

“You’re such a dad,” Karen tells him; forgets to bite her tongue. Her fucking big mouth.

But Frank doesn’t seem to make the connection or ignores it. He winces, the way he does when he’s almost enjoying the banter and doesn’t want to give you the win.

“Making a trip ‘cross the country, gonna need all the energy you can. Don’t wanna make unnecessary stops. I gotta keep my wits on the road, unless you wanna take the night shift driving?”

“No,” Karen says quietly.

They don’t say anything else. They don’t talk about the Accident, about Fisk and how every fucking mistake she’s ever made has finally swarmed to light, every ugly bloated worm exposing her rotten core. They don’t talk about why they’re running. Frank flicks on the radio, some weepy Americana country song, and Karen closes her eyes, tilts her face trying to catch the last rays of sunlight. The silence is better; they always shared good silences, the two of them. It’s the words that are the problem – there’s just so much, so much between them, Frank’s bloody scraps of a life, Karen’s jangled shards, and they can’t say a thing without invariably stepping into some bad shit. Even when she’s not obtuse on purpose and Frank’s not doing his piss-you-away routine. They understand each other in silence.

But Karen’s made up of run-on sentences spilling out of her lips. They’re in Virginia when she asks, “Where are we going?”

Frank doesn’t answer at once.

“I got a place in Florida,” is what he says.

Karen squeezes in a foot under her butt. “I hate Florida,” she says. “You can’t breathe there. My hair feels like it’s carrying a whole lake in it.” She pulls her other leg to her chin. “I have relatives in Florida,” she says.

“Where then—where do you want me to go, huh? Where do you want me to go?” Frank asks and he’s annoyed for real.

“You can get lost in the West,” Karen says, her lips tracing the words against the thin skin of her knee. “Out there, you can be a whole new person.”

“That what you want, Karen?” Frank glances at her in the front mirror. “Didn’t know you wanted to escape that badly.”

Karen furrows her eyes closed.

“I came to New York,” she says, “looking for a new start. Maybe, maybe not a new life, exactly, but a clean slate. A… do-over, so this time I wouldn’t fuck everything up so spectacularly.” She laughs and it tastes bitter.

“You got people in New York,” Frank says. “That—that fancy lawyer guy. Murdock. And—” And me, he doesn’t say, but of course he wouldn’t.

“Matt’s dead,” Karen says colorlessly. “And Foggy…” She shakes her head. “He has his own problems.”

She turns to Frank. “Come with.”

Frank scowls.

“You know I—I got work I gotta get back to, yeah, got scum I gotta clean the city from, you know I…”

He’s got people too, though he won’t say it. Maria and the kids, and every dead man he’s butchered to pay them his bloody respects. The whole damn city is his graveyard.

Karen wants to say you can take your ghosts wherever you go. She wants to say, _I thought Frank Castle was dead_ and _Am I not your people too?_

“There’s plenty of scum everywhere,” Karen says with a shrug. “I’m sure LA could use a cleansing too. I can get a journaling gig, or, or file papers at a clerk’s office, maybe get you something you can use. You can drop by the next scum-a-palooza Vegas convention.”

“You—Stop that.” Frank shakes his head, short. “I don’t want you in this life. You hear?”

“Too late,” Karen says with a mean smile stretching her lips. “I’m already ears-deep in it.”

Frank grunts unhappily. It grates.

“I don’t need you babying me, Frank,” Karen snaps. “I had my own share of trouble. I can handle myself when the stakes are high.” She picks at the hem of her stretched-out oldest skirt. Should’ve worn pants.

“I know you can—” Frank says.

“Then _treat_ me like you do,” Karen interrupts him.

Frank falls quiet. Karen looks out the window: gas station, live peek-show, injury lawyer billboard.

“So you—what?” he says after a moment. “Want us to be some avenging Bonnie and Clyde bullshit?”

Karen smirks. “But better.” Frank scoffs, smiling incredulously, his eyes firm on the road.

“Tha’s not what I do.”

“Then what is it you do?” Karen demands irritably. “’sides being fucking patronizing to me.”

Frank shakes his head.

“I don’t put civilians in danger,” he says.

“I’m hardly a civilian now,” Karen chuckles archly, wrapping arms around her ankles. “I’m so fucking sick of being a pawn in somebody else’s game. It’s just—you try to play by the book but those who wrote it don’t, and everything you do is just _useless_ and they fuck you over again and again… Just give me something tangible to _do_.” She catches Frank’s eyes in the front mirror. “What’s keeping you in New York?” she challenges.

“I can’t go with you,” Frank says.

“Then what are you doing?” Karen raises her eyebrow.

Frank’s hands whiten at the knuckles on the steering wheel.

“I know a guy in Vegas,” Frank says finally. “That can make you disappear. He can hook us up with some papers.”

“Are we eloping?” Karen jokes. Wonders if it’s too much and decides to fuck it.

The left corner of Frank’s mouth quirks a little. The radio screeches _will you ever make your way out of this town and leave behind the ashes of a house that’s burning down._ Frank takes the next exit to 64.

 

 

 

 

 

Shoshone, Nevada is a scorching pan. Their fucking car breaks in the middle of a desert and Frank spends an hour cursing and huffing under the hood, wrench between his teeth, and sweats all through the back of his baseball shirt.

“Next car you steal, I want a convertible,” Karen tells him.

Not a scrap of shadow in sight. She doesn’t even have a hat, but the car is an oven. Nothing worse than near-molten plastic on sweat-sticky skin. It’s even hotter when you’re standing still. Karen circles Frank and the car, trying to find a spot where it’s not caked with moths; they’re everywhere, last night the air was so dense with their tsk-ing you could breathe them. Karen picks mindlessly on one and doesn’t offer to help with the car.

She balls up the sweaty hair at the back of her neck and then drops it, weighting the smothering heat against sure sunburn. She makes a note to buy sunscreen next time they stop at a station; she’s gonna look like a peeling pig by then. Water spray, too.

“Fucking piece of shit,” Frank says and bangs the hood shut. “Sets us hours behind.”

They drive until they can’t anymore. There’s a diner next to a gas station they stop at, though where the owner lives is anybody’s guess. There’s also a ratty motel, just three rooms clumped together with flaky plaster walls and no foundation. A crinkled paper hung on the door says “closed until the season.”

“That’s hilarious,” Karen says drolly.

Frank turns his back to her, looking over the stretching road.

“Would’ve been in Vegas tonight,” he says. “If not the piece of shit car.”

“We’ll be there tomorrow,” Karen says.

Frank walks a few feet toward the gas station—the same chain as the last one and the one before that—and snorts, more pissed than anything.

“Opens at 8,” he says. “Now that’s just great.”

“You’re being an asshole,” Karen tells him because she doesn’t want this to turn into petty bullshit. “We can sleep in the car. You’re making this into something.”

Frank bristles and stalks off to the car.

Karen swings her arms lightly, tips her head up, up, to look at the night sky. So far west, it’s velveteen, so full of warmth you could almost grab it. She closes her hand around air and for a moment she can half-feel it.

She goes to find Frank at the car. He’s sitting on the hood, feet propped on the bumper and staring into the distance.

“I didn’t know gas stations ever closed,” Karen says, leaning next to him on the hood. She wiggles her butt up, made slightly awkward by her dress, loose but bunching up. She thinks about gross moths mashing under the thin layer of cotton and decides she doesn’t care.

“Straight ahead, right there.” Frank jerks his chin at the road stretching into the horizon in front of them. “We take that road and then we’ll be in Vegas.”

Karen turns her cheek into her shoulder, glances up at Frank through her falling hair.

“And what happens after Vegas?”

Frank’s jaw constricts. A vein pops in his neck.

“Stop that,” he says but it’s all different than before, hoarse like it wants to be soft but won’t be. “I can’t…” He quietens.

She leans the top of her head on Frank’s arm, just so. The road is endless before them. Shoots ahead, no curves, no uneven ground. Just the road going on and on across empty desert.

“It doesn’t mean you’re abandoning them,” Karen says quietly.

Frank tenses under her like she anticipated he would; Karen doesn’t take her head off his shoulder, doesn’t take her eyes off the road. Frank slowly settles, his body taut and wary but dormant.

“This… there’s no life with me,” Frank says, low. Subdued. “That’s no life.”

Karen pulls back; Frank tears his gaze from the road to look at her and there’s only heartache in his eyes, like she’s seen handful times before. That day in the elevator, the steel of the gun under her jaw, Frank with blood smeared along the side of his head, sticking his cropped hair, breathing her air as his forehead rested against hers just for a moment. Everything swirling between them.

She touches Frank’s gruff cheek and his eyelids droop for a second and then glint with intent; Karen traces the edge of his lower lip with the slope of her thumb.

“You’re alive,” she whispers. “I’m alive, Frank.”

He closes his eyes. Averts his face; his cheek brushes her palm desperate for contact. “I shouldn’t be.”

“But you _are_ ,” Karen says, wishing by God she doesn’t believe in she could make him understand with just the ferocity of her stare.

She needs him to know, like she does.

“Frank,” she whispers. Frank drags his head up, tortured.

“I’m not the kind of person who says shit like I love you,” she murmurs. Frank starts saying something. “No, shh, Frank.” Her eyelashes flutter. “I want you.”

“Karen,” Frank says raggedly.

Karen follows her finger down brushing along the seam of his shirt and looks up at Frank, steeled.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she says.

Frank thumbs at the line of her chin and brushes a stray hair from her face. Karen’s breath hitches.

“It does,” he says roughly.

His hand is still so gentle on her jaw so Karen grasps it in hers, pulls his big palm to her hip where her dress is riding up and tugs him on top of her. Frank slides a blunt finger absently into the crease of her thigh. He holds himself up with his forearm, so that even though he’s taking up all of her sky he’s barely touching her; so careful, still, careful not to crush her. Karen’s caught in the space between reverent awe and the burning want for _more_.

The hood is hard on her shoulder blades, sticky moths catch in her hair. Her left leg begins to deaden. Karen pushes Frank back and he’s already standing up, falling seamlessly with her movements. Karen’s back hits the driver’s window. Frank hoists her up under her thighs; Karen hunches her dress, pulls it up to her stomach and allows herself to fall against the side of the car. Frank lifts her higher up on his hips and pushes inside her.

“Karen,” he rasps.

The back of her head drops against the edge of the car roof. Frank’s moving with the slow rolling of her hips, radiating-warm and immediate, and so much what she wants it fills her with inexplicable longing. She wants Frank to burrow inside her body and make his home there. She wants to fucking cry, nostalgic for something that hasn’t yet passed.

When Karen looks up, the open Nevada sky is everywhere, pushing all around them and transient like water.

 

 

 

 

 

Karen picks up a box of fiery red hair dye at the gas station at which Frank just quirks an eyebrow.

“How do you feel about Debbie?” she remarks, tossing the dye box into the basket. She looks up and Frank is frowning at her. “I can’t be Karen Page,” she explains. “Do you think I could pull off Midwestern? Debbie uh… Something, from Kansas City, Missouri.”

“Debbie Frank,” Frank says.

“That’s subtle,” Karen snickers. Something swells inside her, warm and strong.

She moves along down the aisle.

“What about you?”

“Bern,” Frank grunts. Karen lifts her eyebrows.

“Bernard Frank,” she tries out. “I guess I can see that. You should grow out your beard again. Bernie.”

“Not wearing a man bun,” Frank says.

They pay. Frank waits by the restrooms and starts up the—shitty—AC in their car. The water runs red and red, and leaves blood-like smudges on the unwashed rusty sink. Karen kicks off her old moth-speckled dress and trashes it. She squeezes into jean shorts so small the pockets stick out under the tearing hem and it feels a little like freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> The song playing on the radio is _Sorry, But I’m Gonna Have To Burn Down Your House_ by Nathan Seeckts. Look it up if you have a while. (Funnily enough, he’s Australian). Also listen to Lana’s _West Coast_.


End file.
